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Memory Almost Full

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Paul McCartney

 
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Memory Almost Full
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Avg: 3.5 (662 ratings)

Macca's remembrance of things past is both refreshingly arty and surprisingly moving.

  • We Say...

    Review by Michael Azerrad

    Thanks to a song he wrote when he was in his twenties, there must have been no human being in history as self-conscious about turning 64 as Paul McCartney. Life hardly ever works out the way you thought it would, and sure enough his 65th year was hardly the vision of senescent domestic tranquility that he'd imagined. So McCartney did what any good artist would do: He made an album about it. As Memory Almost Full amply attests, when you're 64, breakin' up is still hard to do, but you're also not too old for love to put a spring in your step. But most of all, when you're 64, it's a sure bet that you don't have all that much time left, and time itself is going faster and faster.

    McCartney has reached a point in life where he's OK with wrapping his memories around him — and us — like a comfy old coat. So while a lot of this masterly, arty and yet unpretentious pop music is as fresh as he's ever done, there are also unabashed musical hints and references, particularly to Abbey Road, the early solo albums and prime-slice Wings; long-time fans will have a field day. Sometimes it's undeniably gloomy: McCartney's typically obtuse rockers ("Only Mama Knows," the Pink Floyd-y "House of Wax") brim with dread and even the ostensibly whimsical "Mr. Bellamy" has a dark side. But much of the album is emotionally affecting without getting overly sentimental — Memory Almost Full examines the past but not with the corny nostalgia of songs like "Penny Lane" and "Your Mother Should Know." This time, it's done with the benefit of actual age and hard-won wisdom.

    McCartney recorded the album over a span of three and a half years with co-producer David Kahne (the Bangles, Tony Bennett, the Strokes), and it's an amalgam of the raw and the cooked — plenty of fuzz and home-brewed performances, and yet meticulously crafted, with stacked vocal harmonies, sophisticated string arrangements, impeccable musicianship. And that's all great, but the wonderful thing about it is, McCartney actually has something to say. For years, the billionaire rock icon, blissfully wedded to the love of his life, seemed so insular and indulged that there was little grist for his songwriting mill. But the events of the past ten years have left him well gristed — he's also working hard to curtail his hankering for the mawkish and the treacly. Not coincidentally, he's made much more spontaneous, creative and compelling music ever since 1997's Flaming Pie, made as his beloved wife Linda was dying of cancer.

    Opener "Dance Tonight" is a folksy stomp, an invitation to a party delivered in prototypical dance-music terms (“Everybody gonna dance tonight / Everybody gonna feel all right"), and yet it comes off wistful, almost melancholic, and it's not just because of the minor key or the mandolins — it's actually a bit of foreshadowing, and later on we'll learn the implications of partying at Paul's place. It's really "Ever Present Past" that sets the theme: In search of lost time. "I hope it isn't too late/ searching for the time that has gone so fast/ The time that I thought would last," McCartney sings, still preternaturally boyish. The synthetic hurdy-gurdy feeling of the track reminds of XTC's 1989 Oranges and Lemons while the keening one-note guitar lick recalls Guided by Voices; then again, both of those bands can sound an awful lot like… Paul McCartney.

    The album's long gestation would probably explain why there are both love songs and break-up songs here. The gospel-flavored "Gratitude," with McCartney in full-on soul singer mode over resounding piano chords and a deliberate Ringo-esque chug, would seem to be about Heather Mills: "I was living with a memory," he testifies, "But my cold and lonely nights ended when you sheltered me." (Then again, the song seems to be as much about McCartney simply savoring singing the word "gratitude.") Likewise, there's "See Your Sunshine," an unlikely love song to sing, much less write, in the midst of such a toxic clash; it's a bit saccharine, but hats off to him for keeping it on the album (even if a cynic might presume it a calculated act of spin control or a way of mollifying a legal adversary). But then there's "You Tell Me," a ballad recalling idyllic days gone by in a series of questions like "When was that summer when the skies were blue/ The bright red cardinal flew down from his tree," each ending with a withering "You tell me." Conveyed with the sweetest bitterness, it packs all the emotional whiplash of having something very good turn terribly sour, and it's kind of devastating.

    McCartney gets back to contemplating mortality in a suite of songs (sound familiar?) near the end of the album. "Vintage Clothes" offers seemingly contradictory advice: "What went out is coming back/ Don't live in the past, don't hold on to something that's changing fast" and the arrangement, channel-changing from Carole King-like pop to haunting, jazzy clutter to an ELO-like middle eight follows the advice. The straightforwardly autobiographical "That Was Me" rocks an irresistibly jaunty swing, summoning up scenes from boyhood ("at the Scout camp, in the school play") and beyond ("Merseybeatin' with the band"). It really nails that feeling when, once you've lived long enough, you begin to have the strange sensation of looking back on your youth and feeling as if that was a different person, even though life is a seamless continuum. For McCartney, it's the odd, probably mindblowing, realization that that overachieving moptop was "the same me that stands here now." Of course, McCartney's life is truly phenomenal, but he makes being a Beatle into a good for metaphor for any life lived, painted in with achievements and experiences.

    "The End of the End" specifies how his memorial should be conducted — with jokes, stories and music — and that he'll be going to a "much better place — no reason to cry." It's about as maudlin as it gets here, and yet it's absolutely moving, watching McCartney put on his brave face. There's a little whistling solo, but is he whistling for joy or whistling in the dark?

    Strangely, it doesn't end there, on that natural note of finality. With its steady eighth-note piano pulse and offbeat guitar skronks, aptly titled rocker "Nod Your Head" sounds like Sir Paul has been grooving on Spoon's Gimme Fiction, but then it's off to a stomping, "Kashmir"-like groove and squalling, dissonant guitars. As a coda, it's on a par with jarring non sequiturs like "Her Majesty" from Abbey Road or the infamous run-out groove of Sgt. Pepper.

    McCartney has dodged the question, but "memory almost full" happens to be an anagram for "for my soulmate LLM," or Linda Louise McCartney, an almost unbearably poignant fact. It also may be the only real reference to the turmoil surrounding his divorce; "memory almost full" means you have to delete something you don't need so you can keep functioning — or maybe it's that he feels he's reached the point in life where memories are no longer created, only reviewed.

    What's coming around the bend? What's it going to be like when it gets here? We look to friends and loved ones for clues, but we also look to artists. Countless others have reflected on life, loss and mortality since time immemorial, but Paul McCartney is on the cutting edge of exploring it on behalf of baby boomers (and the ensuing generation that perpetually gets caught in their massive slipstream), a group of people famously loathe to acknowledge their own middle age, much less senior citizenship. Memory Almost Full is not as deep as Dylan's Time out of Mind, but it's a hundred times as catchy. Even better, it follows an important rule: write about what you know. And what Paul McCartney knows now is something we'll all find out for ourselves later, so pay heed.



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  • They Say...

    Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide

    Allusion to the digital world though it may be, there's a sweet, elegiac undercurrent to the title of Paul McCartney's Memory Almost Full, an acknowledgement that it was written and recorded when McCartney was 64, the age he mythologized on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released almost exactly 40 years before Memory. Certainly, McCartney has mortality on the mind, but this isn't an entirely unusual occurrence for him in this third act of his solo career. Ever since his wife Linda's death from cancer in 1998, he's been dancing around the subject, peppering Flaming Pie with longing looks back, grieving by throwing himself into the past on the covers album Run Devil Run, slowly coming to terms with his status as the old guard on the carefully ruminative Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. But if that previous record was precise, bearing all the hallmarks of meticulous producer Nigel Godrich, Memory Almost Full is startlingly bright and frequently lively, an album that embraces McCartney's unerring gift for melody. Yet for as pop as it is, this is not an album made with any illusion that Paul will soon have a succession of hit singles: it's an art-pop album, not unlike either of the McCartney albums. Sometimes this is reflected in the construction --- the quick succession of short songs at the end, uncannily (and quite deliberately) sounding like a suite -- sometimes in the lyrics, but the remarkable thing is that McCartney never sounds self-consciously pretentious here, as if he's striving to make a major statement. Rather, he's quietly taking stock of his life and loves, his work and achievements. Unlike latter-day efforts by Johnny Cash or the murky Daniel Lanois-produced albums by Bob Dylan, mortality haunts the album, but there's no fetishization of death. Instead, McCartney marvels at his life -- explicitly so in the disarmingly guileless "That Was Me," where he enthuses about his role in a stage play in grammar school with the same vigor as he boasts about playing the Cavern Club with the Beatles -- and realizes that when he reaches "The End of the End," he doesn't want anything more than the fond old stories of his life to be told. This matter-of-fact acknowledgement that he's in the last act of his life hangs over this album, but his penchant for nostalgia -- this is the man who wrote the sepia-toned music hall shuffle "Your Mother Should Know" before he was 30, after all -- has lost its rose-tinted streak. Where he once romanticized days gone by, McCartney now admits that we're merely living with "The Ever Present Past," just like how although we live in the present, we still wear "Vintage Clothes." He's no longer pining for the past, since he knows where the present is heading, yet he seems disarmingly grateful for where his journey has taken him and what it has meant for him, to the extent that he slings no arrows at his second wife, Heather Mills, he only offers her "Gratitude." Given the nastiness of the coverage of his recent divorce, Paul might be spinning his eternal optimism a bit hard on this song, but it isn't forced or saccharine -- it fits alongside the clear-eyed sentiment of the rest of Memory Almost Full. It rings true to the open-heartedness of his music, and the album delivers some of McCartney's best latter-day music. Memory Almost Full is so melodic and memorable, it's easy to take for granted his skill as a craftsman, particularly here when it feels so natural and unforced, even when it takes left turns, which it thankfully does more than once. Best of all, this is the rare pop meditation on mortality that doesn't present itself as a major statement, yet it is thematically and musically coherent, slowly working its way under your skin and lodging its way into your cluttered memory. On the surface, it's bright and accessible, as easy to enjoy as the best of Paul's solo albums, but it lingers in the heart and mind in a way uncommon to the rest of his work, and to many other latter-day albums from his peers as well.

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